Changing the Game that Religion Plays

Stories in the gospels were remembered, recorded, and eventually reduced to writing because they represented something important for the community.  Often the stories became representative of something greater than the story itself.

In the Second Chapter of Acts, the disciples begin speaking in many languages, and the visitors to Jerusalem, gathered from throughout the known world, begin hearing the disciples, although Galilean, speaking to them in their own language.  Herein lay a fundamental premise of what the Church understood about itself and its nature, and how it distinguished itself from what came before it.

In the ancient world, religion was literally about the practice of exclusion.  That is, the community created rituals, practices, and beliefs to distinguish itself from what was outside the community.  The rituals and practices themselves allowed the community to define itself.  Whenever there was someone or an element within the community that acted contrary to the rules and practices of the community, the community excluded and cast out the person or element that violated the community's practice.

The Second Chapter of Acts evoked the earlier story of Babel, when the peoples of the earth were symbolically scattered; they began speaking different languages.  In the Second Chapter of Acts, the opposite occurs; the people of the earth are drawn together.  The God who was thought to be the one who scatters is revealed to be instead the God who gathers together.

God's vision, the new salvation history, was not to simply create a new chosen people with a new set of beliefs and practices centered in Christ, but instead to change the very understanding of religiosity as the business of casting out and exclusion.  In Christ, God became the one who was excluded to change our perception of the excluded.  Now, the role of the community is not to cast out those who have violated the terms and practices of the community, but to always seek to gather, as God's will is always the redemption of the fallen and lost.  The Church is called to be the community whose every motivation is to gather together so that the entire world might find redemption.

Singing a New Song to the Lord

The Psalmist encourages us to sing a new song to the Lord.  There is a lot that we can learn about discipleship and about God solely through this single phrase in Psalm 98

The metaphor of the believer as songwriter itself is instructive.  The metaphor could be tax accountant and the believer could be encouraged to create for the Lord a new tax shelter.  Songwriting is fun, joyful, and exciting.  It requires enormous creativity and insight.  God wants our discipleship to be like this.

And God wants us to sing a new song, rather than sing the songs that we have sung before.  God loves new expressions of discipleship; new ways of being God's people.  God wants the Church to be a living, organic thing filled filled with excitement and wonder

To put it mildly, the Church often acts exactly the opposite of the image of discipleship that is suggested by the Psalmist.  We make discipleship about as exciting as the creation of a new tax shelter.  Rather than celebrate new ways of being God's people, we stick to the old.  We are terrified of change and want things to stay the same.

Being Easter People means that we understand the nature of the God in whom we believe and have our Being, and then model ourselves after this God.  God is a God of endless creativity; a God whose nature is unchanging, but God's unchanging nature is to incessantly create something new.